Recently in Apple Category

Will the iPad work as a standalone computer, the only one that someone owns? Much of the geek led interest in the iPad stems from its simplification of the computing experience. A device for "the rest of us" that focuses on getting things done with the computer, not doing computing. I agree with this viewpoint, but it does raise a troubling issue. How does someone back up an iPad? The easy option is to backup to a local Mac or PC, but if this is meant to simplify computing, then why do you need another computer to act as sync and backup.

I've read that there is a small segment of iPhone owners who bought it for the internet everywhere computing device I mentioned in a previous post. For some people the iPhone was their only computer, it mostly works in that mode too, as long as your needs are not great.

Backup is the aspect that is not covered. The announcement video and details on Apple's website give some information, but I suspect there is more to come. One suggestion which comes to mind involves additional hardware from Apple. They already have the Time Capsule device for automatic backup of a Mac and it works as a wireless hub too. I can see a wireless access point with a 1-200GB drive inside, plus a dock connector as a single device from Apple. It would provide backup when docked, wireless access when not and a place to charge the iPad overnight.

We are not yet at the point where internet backup restore is that feasible, most people still have 512k ADSL at home, rather than ADSL2+ rates of up to 24meg. Also the customers for this machine are not likely to be the purchasers of high end internet access. A simple backup device like this sticks with the simplicity approach which the iPad offers, plus it gives Apple another profit rich accessory for them to sell.

The Time Capsule already has a USB port, I'd expect a cheaper version of with iPad support using this USB port to be released. Potentially the dock version I mention above and software support for the current models as a USB led iPad backup. 1TB is a bit excessive for a 16-64GB device and $299 is two thirds of the cost of the iPad. Apple may decide to push for more MobileMe subs though and an internet based backup system. Restoring 64GB over basic ADSL is going to take a while... So a smaller and cheaper Time Capsule would be a better match.

I've been meaning to write up something on the iPad since it was announced. Not really about the technology, nor really about it being the computer for the rest of us. Those are interesting, but they've been well covered elsewhere, Fraser Spiers and John Gruber in particular cover it well.

What struck me was instead something about the iPhone. The most significant enabling aspect of the iPhone launch was the unlimited cellular and then later 3G access. It was this ubiquitous access to the internet which drove the continuing demand for the device. This allowed you to check your email, the web, twitter everywhere, plus allowed every app to assume the internet would be there. Imagine an iPhone where you counted every byte you used, I had plenty of phones like that from Nokia on Orange, grim and rarely used.

I believe that this is what Apple are trying with the iPad. I read a lot of science fiction and no where in the plot does someone worry about paying for access to the communal network. It is a given. Just like Apple simplified (forced) the pricing model for 3G phone access I think this is what they are driving at here. No contract, two levels a month for access, compared to 24 month fixed contracts which are the norm from telcos.

Always on, everywhere, unmetered access will change how computers are used, just the same way as the iPhone changed how phones are used, maybe not to the same degree, but it is a shift towards the computer as part of live for everyone, not just geeks with dongles.

I had the logic board in my MacBook Pro replaced under AppleCare warranty recently with fantastic service from the Regent Street Apple Store. That was all good. However when you change the logic board in a mac some things can go awry.

The key thing that changes is the ethernet MAC address of the machine. This is the low level network identity which is used prior to getting a proper TCP/IP address for use on the internet. They are (I think) unique per machine and so they are used as a key for all sorts of things. Two I have found so far are Time Machine and MobileMe syncing.

Neither of these services warns you, they just stop working, which is quite irritating. To fix Time Machine you need to reselect the drive you are backing up to, this should work, but didn't for me.

For MobileMe you need to go to the Sync tab in the MobileMe preferences and tell it that the old machine name is really the same as the new one. Then you'll get to merge the data.

It is a pity that macosx doesn't recognise that it has a new motherboard and offer to fix these for you, but hopefully this list will help you one the right path to getting things back to normal.

Looking at my iPhone I've realized that in less than a month I've used 100MB of data. That is about 30 times the average data usage I had with my N95 and Orange. It does included some app installs, but a lot of those came over home wifi.  I'll admit that my data usage on Orange was capped, but a thirty fold increase surprised me. It does not include much data upload to Flickr, if any. I'm waiting on Flickrexport and haven't tried the others, yet.  Not really news to those of you with iPhones already, but the ease of access to the Internet means those idle moments are used for rss or email or similar. Omnifocus and its syncing to .mac mean I can use the tube ride to process my to do list and it is synced to my mac when I get to work.  I do want my iPhone to be more clever, to know more about me, the activity theory work I've been reading and the aurora video are bleeding across into this post now. Location is only one context, time of day and recency in activity also have a bearing. I'd also like a lot more sites to work on my iPhone, though the rumoured 40 million phones Apple are building might sway that.

I'd quite like an iPhone and slightly regret my 18 month contract with Orange and the new Nokia N95. Though to be honest it is the free data plan that is one of the attractions for the iPhone, seamless access to the internet from a small device would be great. Orange seem to be reluctant to even try to match the data bundle that comes with the iPhone, eight pounds for 30MB is their best offer.

One of the things I've realised I value about Apple is saving me from dealing with the murky world of multiple computing vendors, which I get when I look at the mobile phone industry. Apple offer clean nicely designed spaces, which lack the venal atmosphere of the rest of the IT world. The camera world is similar, at least at the SLR level, there is a simple enough choice Canon or Nikon, perhaps Sony in the future. I'm saved the hassle of picking amongst dozens of providers, I can pick the model I want from Apple, saves time and mental energy. It might not be perfect, but it works well for my computing. I wonder if this is behind the swing to Apple over the last few years.

In terms of actually getting an iPhone, I'd want to see a few things in the next model. Getting to 32G as the storage on the iPhone would be good, the iPod Touch has this so it is solely a pricing issue. A better camera with a little bit more control. Perhaps a xenon flash and optical zoom. It is never going to be a brilliant camera, but it can be better than the 2Mpixel version it comes with. The camera with my N95 is surprisingly good for the size of sensor it has.

3G would be a good addition too, I understand it uses more power and generates more heat, but with the iPhone I have the luxury of being able to charge from my laptop, so the power thing is less of a concern. EDGE is ok, but proper 3G is great, I've used my N95 a couple of times as a modem and I own one of the E220 modems that three.co.uk sell. They are properly fast. Being able to use the iPhone as a modem would be good too, but I can't see the operators agreeing to that too quickly.

The likely iTunes store powered application provision is another reason to be interested in the iPhone. I know that Nokia have tried this in the past, but their client software is overwhelmingly windows based and so alien to me. It is the simple Apple provided and potentially approved world that is appealing, with slight shades of Brave New World. I'll still go and hunt out the jailbroken tools that offer ssh and bit torrent, but I can have a decent simple to install catalog of software directly on my mac.

So enough storage that I can leave my fifth gen 30G iPod behind and just carry my iPhone, a slightly better camera and some interesting software please.

I've been using Transmit to backup my files to strongspace for a year or more, resting easy in the knowledge that I have an offsite snapshot of my Documents folder. I've also been backing up my Address Book files from ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook and my iCal files too. However with the arrival of Leopard, the way the address book stores data has changed, using the new Core Data storage mechanisms. There is a new AddressBook-v22.abcddb database file and a new metadata folder. This data was taking a long time to backup via transmit. The mirroring in Transmit seems to change directories between images and metadata a lot. So I wanted a more simple and quicker approach.

I'm already using Automator via iCal to run the backups. See this recipe from Joyent. So I opened Automator and deleted the folder based backup I had been using and set about figuring out how to backup the data in my address book. I tried a bunch of different approaches, but the one which works is to export all the entries to vcards and then backup the resulting files.
To do this you'll need to do two things, create a new group in Address Book containing everyone and then create the Automator script below.

My oldest data in my Address Book is about 5 years old, as I've been upgrading macosx since 10.1. I think these settings will work for everyone, the important thing is that both rules have the same timeframe. This gets you a new group with every entry that you can access from Automator. The default All group is not usable from Automator.

Then you need to enter the three rules above in Automator. Find every person in the group you just created. Then you need to get the details of the people. Applescript, the technology behind Automator is a bit odd, what the first rule does is get a collection of objects representing the people, the second rule turns these into real people. If you run these three rules in isolation in Automator you can see this process happen, look at the results tab.

Then the last rule exports these people into vcard files in your file system, it will overwrite existing files. This is what we want to have happen in this case, but it is best to give it an empty folder of its own.

I then run my normal mirror upload to Strongspace of my Documents folder. I was getting mirror times of over an hour previously using the mirroring the address book folder. With this vcard based approach it takes seconds.

Tags:
apple, leopard, macosx, Address Book, StrongSpace, backup, automator, transmit

Some quick thoughts on the new Leopard release, others such as John Siracusa and John Gruber have done such a comprehensive jobs, that these are merely personal observations after 12 hours of use.

The checking DVD consistency from the intstaller seems a bit odd, but I guess there must have been too many problems with scratched DVDs in the past for this to be a necessary step, luckily you can skip it.

I lost all my setup printers and the machine name changed to Macintosh.local as opposed to arctinic, which it retained as a computer name, all a bit odd. I thought Macintosh was deprecated within Apple.

The invisible fsck before letting you install is frustrating, it looks as if the install will not proceed, as there is no indication for you to wait whilst the file system check completes. A simple please wait would be enough.

The menus are weird, loosing the corners and gaining curves on the bottoms of menus after 20 years seems strange. The translucency of the menu bar is an odd decision as many have commented. The dock on the side and hidden is bearable.

Mail is really quick now, as is Spotlight, I'll still update quicksilver, but it will be good to have a quick access to system wide search. Performance is something Apple really do well, that is making things seem fast, I have a story in my head that the Apple development approach is to not let new features slow done the existing system, so if you add something that slows the system down, you need to compensate, sadly I can't find the reference anymore.

It is the dozens of minor changes that make this a nice release like the Bluetooth menu allowing you to change things about the connected gadgets. The redone Sharing control panel which makes more sense. CoverFlow and QuickLook, how have we lived without these tools, they are fab, finding something is so much more easy.

Time Machine looks fabulous, particularly when combined with a remote offsite backup solution like Strongspace and a bootable recovery tool like SuperDuper! Then all the bases are covered theft/fire immediate recovery and careless deletion. Whether I manage to do all of these it a moot point.

I'm looking forward to having fun with the sharing facilities of iChat, but outside our company firewall, as only Adium seems to be able to get through it. Spaces seems excellent if slightly inconsistent, picking up focus seems to not be obvious, particularly when moving to the window with Firefox, but maybe Safari is worth looking at again for general web browsing leaving Firefox for hacking.

On the whole I'm happy with my eighty-five quids worth, the wireless keyboard is better value and more shiny though...

Apple ship Mac OS X 10.5 tomorrow, hot on the heels of fantastic results, as sharply written up by John Gruber. I don't think I'm going to make it to the launch event tomorrow, but will be getting Leopard pretty soon. The guided tour is pretty informative, standouts for me from the video are Time Machine, Cover Flow and Quick Look. The ability to look inside files without waiting for applications to launch will be super. Time Machine solves a hard problem in backups, giving you the ability to head back to a single file, without reverting the entire disk to that state. The integration with individual applications looks clever too, hopefully it will be simple to integrate this with non-Apple applications.

The sharing tools in iChat look really smart and Spaces seems like a clean implementation of the unix virtual desktop metaphor. There is also a ton of developer level updates in this release from improved Automator and Applescript to Ruby on Rails as a shipping tool.

For a bit of fun I have a nice picture of a Leopard who is just waiting for your captions too.

Tags:
apple, macosx, leopard, caption competition

Why did I just take an 18 month contract and a new N95 than wait six months with my Nokia 6630 and get an iPhone on O2?

The primary driver was availability, plus GPS, 3G, a decent camera and the rest (funny mocking ad comparing N95 and iPhone). I've waited through the N70, the N80 (briefly) and the N73 waiting for a phone which can act as a computer, camera and phone in one. I'm interested in how much of my persistence I can manage through my phone. I'm a twitter user and with the N95 I'll become a jaiku user. Then there is fire eagle and getting the flickr client working again on my phone.

The iPhone looks nice, but as willo and Duncan point out it is not without its flaws. Much of the UI strangeness comes from it feeling like an American product, not a European one. SMS is an important part of my life, as is decent 3G access. It seems unlikely that the iPhone will gain either 3G or proper GPS soon. The SMS issues, like only one recipient will be fixed, but the mapping aspect is important.
I lost my phone a while ago and I've not got round to moving the Lumisoft map application to my replacement 6630. I miss it a lot. I'd not realised how much a part of my life it had become for me in London. The N95 promised to offer this for the whole of the UK and potentially the rest of Europe. That is tempting.

Give me 18 months and an improved iPhone and I might be tempted, but for now the open environs of the N95 seem quite tempting, I'll be installing apache and Python soon. I really hope Omni allow S60 access to the rails app in OmniFocus though.

I tend to generate 12-20 tabs very easily when I'm researching a topic and then I can leave them open for a good while as I get around to reading them all. I can end up with 100 plus tabs open easily. In Safari this leads to heavy memory usage and on my 2GB PowerBook G4 this lead to 2 or more Gig of swap space and a basically unusable machine. Seconds of waiting between actions, at times. All cured by either quiting Safari and letting the VM recover or a restart. So, I decided to finally switch to Firefox.

I know it has taken me ages, but I'd got taken by Saft and saving my open tabs. Session Saver did this for Firefox 1.5 and it is now a slightly hidden feature on Firefox 2. A dropdown is not a good place to hide additional functionality. It is on the first tab in preferences, but looks like a drop down that controls the Home Page behaviour. So the other reason to move to Firefox, the lovely add-ons eg Operator and Tails which highlight microformats.

Firefox is not without its faults, it seems to be more CPU bound than Safari was, so my machine has a lower VM usage, 1 gig typically, but the CPU load sits about 2 most of the time. It makes my envious of Lucy's new MacBook.